That was the sound of a Lost-style flashback there. We’re cutting back to a key moment in my retirement, one that will initially seem unrelated to present events but will gradually connect to my A story to a point where you go, “Huh. Okay”.

As you’d no doubt imagined, even in my official downtime I was righting many a wrong, kicking many an arse, changing many a world. Chief among my efforts was my campaign to liberate the simple people of Scotland from the foul tyranny of the wretched English. I voted yes, is what I’m saying. In the referendum that happened.

I was way above that shit when the campaign kicked off, banging on about the narrowness of nationalism, the folly of artificial borders, our future of togetherness and oneness and world government. Yer classic self-righteous blue-sky bullshit that turns people off quicker than the Trump/Hitler slash fiction I’m selling from the boot of my Prius for 2.99 ono.

As the campaign rumbled on I shifted my thinking a little, downgrading from superiority to almost total indifference. I wasn’t full on sitting on the fence but I was checking the fence out a bit, wondering if it could take my weight. I shifted a little more. I started figuring even if borders are artificial and nations are balls and generalisations about whole peoples are lazy, in general it seemed like the people on this side of the artificial border were less right-wing than the people on that side of the artificial border, keener on free prescriptions than melting humans with pricey nuclear warheads. It felt like maybe independence could be yer one step backward before yer two steps forward kind of thing, the ends of lefty utopian oneness justifying the means of divvying up the world a bit more, temporarily. Then I saw a poster about how we could boot the Tories out forever, and I kicked the fence square in the balls and ran, leaping giddily into the arms of the Yes mob.

For the first time in my surprisingly inactive activist career I got full-on properly stuck in, knocking every door I came across, stickering every lamppost I peed against, leafleting enough of the country to undo 38 years of committed recycling, and warning everyone I’d ever met about the possibly impending Tory re-election and the maybe possibly impending threat of UKIP MPs. It was amazing, the feeling of actually participating in actual issue-politics that actually had an actual chance of actually changing something. We could do our bit for nuclear disarmament! We could scrap the bedroom tax, and all Tory cruelties forever! We could separate ourselves from the coming right-wing apocalypse and model progressiveness for the dickheads down south. It was one of the most exciting, hopeful, positive, optimistic, realistic, meaningful, actually achievable things I’ve ever been involved with.

On the final day of the campaign I and my do-gooding bitch did a 12-hour stint, getting people out to vote, leafleting train stations and bus stops and haranguing last minute undecided voters as they made their way to the booths. And as the polls closed we retired, tired and excited, to Zero Towers, the floor a sea of blue and yellow balloons, and collapsed in front of the telly to see what a couple of Dimblebys had to say about our certain, glorious, history-making victory…

Whoosh! That was us cutting back to the present, Lost-style. Cutting back to me, post-Brexit, with little Englanders fashioning a statue of Farage from their dried up bile, back to me brooding over what might have been, over 27 harder borders and what chance we have at independence now and whether Lost is already too old a pop-culture reference. It could be, I think. My God, I think it could be.

Doof!

That was a Lost-style punchy finish there. Hard to get across in type.

So we’re Brexiting, and at least two of the horsemen of the apocalypse are saddling up. We’re now so deep in shit Nick Clegg is the voice of electoral reason, Neil Kinnock and Ed Miliband are slagging a Labour leader for not being up to the job and we’re actually relieved Theresa May’s pitching in as our unelected prime minister. The big questions for us Zero types are where do we go from here, and what can be done now? I ask because with Cameron, Boris and Farage all fucking off out of it, no one seems to have a clue.

First up, in the category of undignified post-breakup booty calls, there’s that petition asking the government to attach a bit of small print to the referendum, triggering a redo if the winning side got less than 60% of the vote. It needs 100,000 signatures for parliament to debate it, and right now we’re north of 4 million. That’d be encouraging if the petition hadn’t been started back in May, by a Brexiter, before votes were cast and when changing the rules would have been less like cheating. As big a number as 4 million is it’s smaller than the 16 million who voted Remain and are now presumably proper miffed, and even smallerer than the 17 million who voted Leave and are now either delighted or slapping their protest-voting foreheads. For this to mean anything it’d have to get more signatures than the referendum got Leave votes. That’s perfectly possible, given robots and people from all over have been signing it, but more likely this will go nowhere. It’s another round of futile, feel-good, clicktivist wind-pissery. Naturally, I signed it.

Then there’s the likes of the protests in Glasgow and London, which boasted tens of thousands of fairly peeved people. But, again, tens of thousands is less than 4 million, which is less than 16 million, which is less than 17 million. People, if we’re really into a bit of the old democracy we’re going to have to accept sometimes it blows and stupid things happen and bad people win and this time we lost. So, again, the big questions are where do we go from here, and what can be done now?

If protesting the result isn’t a goer we need to look elsewhere, maybe go after democracy a bit. Give it a shove to the left here, a whiff of self-determination there. We need an active, anti-racist, pro-European, pro-social justice, pro-socialist left to kick the bullshit out of austerity and counter the inward-looking drift to the right. How to get there is the thing.

If you’re in England or Wales you could get behind a fractured and incompetent Labour Party in the hope it finishes Human Centipeding itself in time for an election. You could get behind the Greens and be all principled and righteous on the sidelines. Or you could get behind the Lib Dems, if you can forget the last time you got behind them and you’re not put off by a leader who in all other universes is a duty manager in a middling leisure centre.

If you’re in Northern Ireland you could aim for reunification which, with my admittedly limited knowledge of Irish history, should be pretty straightforward.

In Scotland, where the majority voted Remain, where The Zero sub is currently docked and where I’ll be focusing my efforts, there’s room for a little more hope. In the immediate aftermath of the vote, while Cameron and Osborne and Boris and Gove were hiding behind the sofa with the lights out, and Tom Watson was getting mad with it at Glasto, and the rest of Labour was busy sewing its mouth to its own bumhole, Nicola Sturgeon appeared to be taking things seriously. She had something resembling a plan, jetting off to Brussels to explain how England’s not talking for the both of us, looking into how we can stay in the EU, and lining us up nicely for a second shot at independence. That’d cut us free and clear of the mouth-breathing xenophobes down south, the worst cruelties of the 800 years of Tory rule they’re about to enjoy, and solidly piss off the Daily Mail. People, that’s the basket I’m putting my all my eggs into.